I KNOW boys like their toys.

I also know that when someone is moving in with you, you have to accommodate their interests and taste even if you don’t quite share them.

But nothing prepared me for the monstrously large television that I found in my lounge, let alone the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen that it was sitting on.

My boyfriend moved in at the weekend – and with him, of course, came his ‘stuff’.

My house is very small and I’ve spent a lot of time trawling junk shops finding furniture I could strip down and do up.

But much of my boyfriend’s furniture looked like he’d been to a clearance sale at an 80s pine warehouse.

Luckily he wasn’t overly attached to any of it so I managed to convince him that it didn’t need to move in along with him.

But having a big TV seemed incredibly important to him.

I don’t get the big TV thing but for men, size seems to matter – I’m sure Freud would have had a lot to say about that.

Anyway, the upshot was that I felt mildly depressed by this take-over of my living room and a bit at a loss as to what to do.

Having someone move in with you requires delicate handling.

You might feel your space is being invaded but your home is now their home too and you have to respect the fact that they need to make it feel like theirs.

My friend Hannah says that she kept forgetting that she’d moved in to her boyfriend’s house. She says: “You know when you go round someone else’s house the norm is for them to do the entertaining, e.g. make you a cup of tea, cook dinner, wash up? I found it really weird when I moved in with my boyfriend because I was so used to that being the way things worked that even when it was my house as well, I found myself asking him if he could make me a cup of tea and do me favours all the time!”

My friend May had the ‘stuff’ issue when her man moved in. She says: “My partner came with a lot of I.T. and music equipment. We’d already decided he’d have the spare bedroom to accommodate this equipment. This became his space and helped him to have a sense being established in the house. However, he also came with some other items of household paraphernalia with which, though we had no possible use for it, he was very reluctant to part with. This included two huge and rather unattractive floor cushions. Eventually he conceded that he didn’t need to keep them and I was very relieved when they were conveyed to the local dump. I think that probably, when he first moved in, the extraneous items served a purpose as a ‘comfort blanket’ and, once he felt fully integrated, he was able to let go of them.”

Recognising that my boyfriend needs to make his mark, I’ve suggested we redecorate the bathroom, made sure I’ve made lots of cupboard space for his things, accepted the need to put up new shelves and thrown out a fair amount of my stuff.

And perhaps because of this he has, thankfully, agreed that the television really is much too big and has to go – and the stand with it. Now if I can just convince him that doing the washing up everyday will make him feel really at home I’ll be onto a winner!